We recently described Wisconsin Wetlands Association’s efforts to help state agencies integrate wetland strategies to address issues of statewide concern. State agency initiatives offer an effective pathway to increase public investments in wetlands conservation and build a more robust and cohesive wetland workforce.
With some agencies, meaningful opportunities exist to work within the existing program structure to build capacity and demand for wetland conservation work. In other cases, the structures to integrate wetlands as solutions are not yet in place—so we need to first imagine them and then build them.
Our recent efforts on behalf of Wisconsin Emergency Management (WEM) illustrate this latter approach.
Between 1980 and 2024, Wisconsin experienced 63 weather-related disasters with damages exceeding the equivalent of $1 billion in today’s prices*. Forty-nine of those events, accounting for 74% of the costs, were caused by severe storms or flooding.
WEM is the state agency that facilitates the distribution of state and federal funds for disaster assistance and recovery. They also lead the development of Wisconsin’s statewide hazard mitigation plan and provide a variety of supports to aid in the development and implementation of local hazard mitigation plans.
The strategies identified in hazard mitigation plans aim to break the cycle of disaster-related damage and repair by reducing or eliminating the long-term risk to human life and property. This is where wetlands come into the picture.
Our work in Ashland County, which had six federal disaster declarations between 2012-2022, has helped make the case for the restoration of wetlands and floodplains as a pre-disaster hazard mitigation strategy.
As a Wisconsin Wetlands Association (WWA) supporter, you know that healthy wetland landscapes help slow the flow of water and infiltrate rain and snowmelt where it lands. You also know (and WWA’s work in the Lake Superior Basin illustrates this very clearly) that the loss of headwater wetland storage and floodplain connectivity contributes substantially to the extent and severity of storm-related road and culvert washouts.
It stands to reason then, that the restoration of wetlands and floodplains upstream of repetitively damaged transportation infrastructure should be a well-considered and widely implemented hazard mitigation strategy in Wisconsin.
When analyzing the supports available for the development and implementation of local hazard mitigation plans, we found examples of federal and state policies that could theoretically support wetland-focused hazard mitigation strategies, but we found little to no evidence that such projects were being funded. Instead, existing programs prioritized buyouts or flood proofing of at-risk structures, and these programs were oversubscribed to the point that projects designed to assess or address the root causes of flooding simply could not compete.
This left us with two choices: advocate for program changes to ensure that hydrologic restoration proposals could successfully compete for existing funding, or create something new. Knowing that efforts to retrofit long-standing and overprescribed programs are often met with resistance, we looked for other opportunities.
Today, thanks to a successful collaboration with forward-thinking legislators and the enthusiastic support of the Evers’ Administration, WEM has received $2 million in each of the last two state budgets to develop and administer a new Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant Program.
Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant Program facts and impacts
The Wisconsin Legislature and Governor Evers created the Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant (PDFRG) through 2023 Wisconsin Act 265 to help communities in flood-prone areas assess flood vulnerabilities and restore the landscape’s natural ability to manage floods (i.e., hydrologic restoration) through both assessment and implementation grants. Here’s a short run-down of the program’s first year:
- In 2024, WEM received 23 applications requesting more than $3.8 milllion, nearly double the $2 million of available funding.
- Statewide, 11 communities received awards (see map below).
- Grantees included 2 Regional Plan Commissions, 4 counties, 2 cities, 1 village, and 2 towns.
Assessment grants included proposals to evaluate flood vulnerabilities caused by inundation and erosion as well as multiple countywide road-stream crossing inventories looking at culvert and stream conditions.
Implementation grants included three projects focused on restoring the health and flood storage functions of wetlands and wetland-stream corridors.
WEM has invited WWA and advisors from various programs within Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to help refine the criteria for the second round of grants review.
WEM has also requested WWA’s assistance in compiling and communicating other sources of funding grantees could pursue to implement hydrologic restoration projects identified as priorities through PDFRG-funded assessment projects.
We are excited about how this new program elevates wetlands as solutions, and we look forward to seeing the tangible impacts it produces on the landscape: more wetlands and safer communities.
Related content
Building policy and program supports for wetland conservation: The importance of state agencies
From the director: What it means to have an impact